


Life as a Glass House

by syllogismos



Category: A Single Man (2009)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Fix-It, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Modern Architecture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-24
Updated: 2016-12-24
Packaged: 2018-09-11 16:58:33
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,246
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8999263
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/syllogismos/pseuds/syllogismos
Summary: A well-designed house is a living thing. It is skin of glass and bones of wood. It stands to shelter and protect. It takes the wash of rain, endures every whip and ruffle of wind. The bright of the sun bleaches its bones slowly but does not weaken them.
The inhabitants of this house have numbered:
one, lonely;
then two, loving;
and now—presently—one again, alone and fearful.
His name is George.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [spock](https://archiveofourown.org/users/spock/gifts).



A well-designed house is a living thing. It is skin of glass and bones of wood. It stands to shelter and protect. It takes the wash of rain, endures every whip and ruffle of wind. The bright of the sun bleaches its bones slowly but does not weaken them.

The inhabitants of this house have numbered:

one, lonely;

then two, loving;

and now—presently—one again, alone and fearful.

His name is George.

* * *

The telephone rings, louder and harsher in this vastness that, for the last several weeks, only George now occupies. He answers simply with _Hello?_ , for George has learned a hard lesson about answering the telephone: never make assumptions about who may be on the other end of the line or what dire announcement may be forthcoming, comprehensible only as single words that must be played back and reassembled to be understood.

_Car accident. A lot of snow here. Lost control. Wrapped around a tree. Leg crushed._

That was twenty days ago. Today, in the is and now, the same voice is on the other end of the line.

“Mr. Falconer?”

"Yes, this is he.”

“It’s Harold Ackerly. How are you today?”

“Fine, thank you. And yourself?” George shifts to the edge of his chair, leaning forward in restrained anticipation, as if there’s another line of inquiry he would prefer to pursue, but politeness precludes the asking.

“Good, thank you. I–”

George is holding his breath, an unfortunate habit.

“Sorry, I suppose I should start by telling you that Jim’s recovery is proceeding well. The doctors are quite pleased.”

George almost collapses back into his chair, the tension dropping from him like rain down a drainpipe. His next breath is too quick, and he raises the handset away from his mouth for a moment to hide the sound of it.

“Oh, that is wonderful news, thank you for letting me know.” George tucks the handset up between his ear and shoulder to free up a hand and adjusts his glasses. His hand shivers with a fine tremor.

“You’re welcome. The real reason I’m calling is– Well, the doctors say Jim is ready to leave the hospital, and I wanted to offer, if you’d like, to drive him back to you.”

“Would that be safe?” George pauses before he asks the next question and grips the arm of his chair so hard his knuckles appear pale-white at the base of each finger, “Is he strong enough for such a long journey?”

“Yes. I asked one of his doctors. He’ll be in pain, but lying down in the passenger seat with his leg on the dashboard– They said he could do it.”

“Does he want to?”

“I– Mr. Falconer, are _you_ accepting my offer?”

“Yes, yes I am, very much so, as long as it’s safe and it’s what Jim wants.”

A silence stretches, until it’s thin and taut, filling the space in this house with tension from pane of glass to pane of glass. George fidgets, then breaks: “Mr. Ackerly? Are you–”

“I haven’t asked Jim, Mr. Falconer, and I haven’t told his parents that I’m offering this. They think Jim’s going to recover with them.”

“Oh.” George is stunned into monosyllabicity, a condition he’s not accustomed to, not in the time that he’s lived within these four walls, a considerable stretch of days stringing together into weeks, months, years. This house—with skin of glass and bones of wood—has watched over George and sheltered him from storms for over a decade. It has heard, many times before, the racing rhythm that his heart is drumming now.

“They say it helps,” Mr. Ackerly’s tone is softer, gentling, “to recover in a familiar environment, with the support of–” Perhaps he can’t say _family_ , so he says nothing at all.

“Yes, I see. I don’t think I can’t express enough, Mr. Ackerly, how much I appreciate your offer. I would love to have m– Jim back, and I’m prepared to fully support his recovery here.”

“All right, good. I’ll ask Jim, and I’ll call you again with the details when I have them.”

“Please do. Thank you, Mr. Ackerly. Thank you for your–” George pauses, struggling to choose a word, another behavior not at all customary for him. “For your compassion.”

Between returning the handset to its cradle and the next shrill ring of the telephone, some two days and several hours later, George does not leave the shelter of these walls.

The first night, he does not sleep. He pours a generous two fingers of whiskey into a crystal tumbler and carries it with him like a talisman. He wanders the full extent that these floors offer, his unsocked feet quiet and soothing on adolescent wood, still settling.

This house keeps quiet for him; nothing creaks or squeaks or groans under his weight. The moon is low, but just past full and blazing silver straight through its skin of glass. Everything inside is etched in shadow, corners and edges sharpest. He stands where the moon streams through brightest, sips his drink, and looks at the moon as if he wishes he were naïve enough to press it for answers. He sighs, he looks away. The glass slips from his fingers, but this floor is quick: it cushions the blow enough to prevent the crystal from shattering. Only the drink itself is spilled, a pungent puddle, amber liquid on amber wood. (And this floor will have a scar: a small dent, a house-memory.)

George looks down at the spill. When he raises his head again, his eyes are shining, and he scrubs at them roughly with the back of his hand, then forces his legs into carrying him to his study, where he sits at his desk until the first gentle caress of dawn touches his brow.

The day that dawned brightly swiftly turns overcast, as if in sympathy for the ward of this house’s sleepless night. Winter—such as it is in southern California—still squats heavy on the land. The wind picks up, bringing with it the tangy bite of the sea, and this house braces against it to keep quiet, for George has finally settled himself to rest, curled tight on his side, almost hugging himself, under a sheet he has repeatedly failed to change because it still carries a faint odor of Jim. The weekend has come to a close, and the neighboring houses are watching their charges put on their Sunday best, polish their shoes, file out and drive off to a church filled with pews and pews of similar best and polish. They will pray and sing, but not for George.

Twilight falls, sifting through this house’s skin to paint everything in a flat, warm light. George wakes slowly; this house notes the event as a change in the rhythm of his heartbeat. He has rolled most of the way onto his back, and his face isn’t as peaceful as it should be in sleep. Even at rest, the tense lines in his forehead betray his worries.

This house has seen George this way before. Before finding his Jim, George ached through his days, and this house watched, impotent as a bystander, just as it watches now.

Before this house took shape, George came often to where it would eventually come to stand, to the wide plot scattered with great, old oaks. He couldn’t build yet—the War was on—so he came and picnicked in the shade, and he dreamt. He dreamt of this house: a house built into the oaks and open to them, just a skin’s width of glass between elements and hearth. He dreamt of meals taken inside that would still feel like picnics, leaves in the wind dappling the light, or a deer, on occasion, passing by wide-eyed and innocent. In those days, the shelter of the oaks and the dream were enough.

Then, when this house was young and untested, and both George and its walls breathed the scents of wood polish and new leather, George established his habits.

They were the habits of a pretender—neither intentionally dishonest nor deceptive. In its long years of observation, in fact, this house has come to know George as a man who values honesty, openness, and transparency to a very high degree indeed. After all, he did build a glass house.

George’s pretense, in those early days, had been that he was happy with a life of the mind. That a life of the mind—which is to say: a life alone and entirely abstinent—could be fulfilling. Perhaps he did not delude himself so far as to believe that such a life would be as fulfilling as the alternative, but he playacted at the happiness he had convinced himself (so desperately!) was possible. He filled this house with books, double-stacking some of the shelves, arranging and rearranging under different schemes until he could find what he wanted by instinct, just by stepping and reaching, pulled as if by an invisible string behind his navel to a volume of Aristotle (in the original Greek), or Woolf, or, if in a maudlin mood, to a well-thumbed Complete Poems of Lord Alfred Tennyson.

He _was_ content, some days. He had a monograph on Lorca in progress; the title came a few weeks in, boldly, typed in all capitals: _DO NOT WORRY TO DIE: IMAGERY OF DEATH IN LORCA’S_ LLANTO POR IGNACIO SANCHEZ MEJIAS. The dining table was covered in books, journals, dictionaries. Pads of paper sacrificed their sheets to George’s pen and then either to exile pressed between pages as scrap simply marking a place to remember or to the waste bin. This house was full of sounds. Not loud, but enough: whisper turns of pages, hammer strikes at the typewriter, arguments sketched into sentences in the air, first, before the transfer to fingers and paper. George recited too; it was poetry, how could he not?

Even this house could see—feel, more accurately—the appeal. Words like music; images darkly beautiful.

_Pero ya duerme sin fin._ (But now he sleeps endlessly.)

George on the days when he is _not_ content, when rain sluices over this house’s skin, no sun in sight, and George doesn’t leave his bed except to answer the call of nature or make himself a drink.

_Ya los musgos y la hierba_ (Now the moss and grass)

This plot of land, the fresh scent of the soil in spring, after a brief shower; the worms that follow the rain, seizing the opportunity for a pilgrimage, a chance to settle somewhere new.

_abren con dedos seguros_ (open with sure fingers)

George’s hands, long-fingered, decisive at the keys of his typewriter, elegant when wrapped around the barrel of his fountain pen.

_la flor de su calavera_ (the flower of his skull)

A flash, an image: letters to friends and those who have an interest, laid out in a perfect grid; an old pistol, smelling of gun oil, another thing for George’s hands to look elegant wrapped around; George looking at himself in the mirror, sad; George, dead, facedown, inside this house, inside where it can protect him, where the moss and grass _won’t_ open the flower of his skull, where at least his peace and dignity beyond the veil are guaranteed.

In those days, he dragged himself out of bed if not _with_ the sun, then not far behind it. He rose to the call of duty, to The Work, even when the rising ran contrary to his nature. And it was not without consolation: he’s always liked the way the light passes through the skin of this house in the morning, even if he doesn’t like mornings for themselves. Even if the whole was an elaborate feint, there was truth in George’s half-smile as he sipped the day’s first coffee and reread the previous day’s writing.

* * *

Two suitcases and a young man at the front door. This house is acquainted with him already; it has watched George be kissed by Jim.

They even talked about this house, then. “I don’t think you’re quite ready for life in a glass house,” George had said, but Jim had not been deterred. Watching them put a little more life into drying bones. Jim seeking, _campaigning_ , a military man in every sense. Kisses at the window, in the sun, with this house and the oaks bearing witness.

And later, the campaign continued in front of the fire. Jim coaxed George out of his clothes, his lips surveying the skin he uncovered. The firelight played on George’s skin, highlighting the increased pace of his breathing in the rise and fall of his chest. George was on his back, his knees raised and spread to admit Jim between them. Jim stood to undress himself, and George closed his legs, hiding his flushed and hardening cock from view. He watched the progress of Jim’s disrobing with the focus he usually only applied while shaving with a straight razor or cooking something delicate (fish, for example, or sea scallops). After Jim had finished, he ran a hand down his own bare chest straight to his cock, jutting out away from his body. He stroked his hand along the full length of it _once_ , then _twice_ , watching George watch him, watching the Adam’s apple in George’s throat bob as he swallowed.

“Come back here.” George’s voice was hoarse, rough.

Jim dropped to his knees at George’s feet. He tapped one of George’s knees gently. “Open these for me, then,” he said softly.

George spread his legs to admit Jim back between them, and Jim slid into the opening made for him immediately, as if, perhaps, to prevent George from feeling even the slightest temptation to withdraw. He slid forward until the tops of his thighs pressed against the backs of George’s and his torso hovered over George’s.

George raised his hands to Jim’s shoulders, rubbed down the length of his back as far as he could reach, tensing slightly as he drew his hands back up to cup the back of Jim’s neck. “You’re gorgeous. I can’t–”

Jim cut him off with a kiss and stopped further thought entirely by dropping his hips into the cradle of George’s, letting their pricks slide together. George made a sound—not very loud, hard to classify, but startling all the same. A whimper, almost, but not pained. Surprised. Helpless.

Jim rolled his hips, and George made the sound again, considerably louder.

Jim released George’s mouth, left him panting as he trailed kisses back down: under George’s jaw, in the hollow of his throat, a stripe licked along his sternum, a teasing dip into George’s navel, trembling with its own heartbeat. George’s hands had moved to Jim’s head, holding him by the ears, and his knees were a vice clamp around Jim’s hips and upper thighs, whether from the tension of arousal or the enduring fear of naked exposure, it was impossible to tell.

Jim sat up, back onto his heels, and pried the vice apart with both hands, holding George’s knees wide as he looked down at what George wanted to hide between them.

“ _Jim_ –” Exhalation. Plea? Exhortation?

Their eyes were locked on each other. “I want–” Jim started, but then he finished his sentence with action, bending to take the head of George’s cock into his mouth. He took more, when George reacted by curling his hips up, his spine curling into the shape of a comma, a pause marking the division between the first timorous phrase of their lovemaking and the second, which was bolder, less inhibited.

George came in Jim’s mouth, still cradling Jim’s head by the ears. He shuddered through Jim’s tongue licking him clean, and when Jim had finished George rolled himself onto his stomach, legs together but ass tilted up. He squeezed his thighs tight around Jim’s cock when Jim slid himself into the invitation. He reached back, straining his shoulder to keep his hand on Jim’s nape. Jim thrust between George’s thighs like the young man he was: quick, sharp thrusts. He released after a few minutes, pressing hard into George’s buttocks, then twitching his hips through the aftershocks.

George squeezed the back of Jim’s neck in warning before he shifted to roll Jim off his back, turning and rearranging limbs until they were face-to-face.

“To answer that question from earlier,” Jim said, his hand between them moving to trace fingertips across George’s lips, “Yes, I’ll stay in California. I’ll move in, if you still want me.”

George surged forward and rolled Jim onto his back with the force of his kiss, deep and claiming. “Yes,” he gasped, breaking away, “I still want you, you heathen.”

* * *

When they return, this house is dark; everything is steeped in coal black under the new moon. They are out of step with each other: Jim, quick to return himself to home, removing his shoes, hanging his jacket, circuiting to switch on lamps. George is clumsy with drink, dragging his feet. He hangs his jacket first and then, one-handed, unbuttons his shirt—once crisp, now limp and damp with sweat under his arms—halfway down his chest. George’s fingers stumble on his shoelaces, and he sits down for a second attempt.

“Need help with those, old man?” Jim offers, kneeling, not smiling, but not without affection. His fingers trace George’s ankle under his trousers, and George shivers.

“Much obliged.”

In the bedroom, Jim undresses George, with just the reading light on Jim’s side of the bed casting large shadows. He puts the toothbrush in George’s hand and pushes him, gently, to the bathroom.

When George returns to the bedroom, Jim is undressed, and all their clothes are sorted to the appropriate laundry. The bed is turned down, inviting. Jim walks past George to relieve himself and brush his own teeth. George stands for a minute, frozen between the promise of cool sheets against his skin and the lean figure his lover cuts in the open doorway to the bathroom. He makes a decision and commits to it, wrapping his arms around Jim’s waist from behind, pressing his lips to Jim’s shoulder. George’s penis rubs against the small of Jim’s back and the top of his cleft, but there’s nothing sexual in the intimacy. (Only intimacy in the intimacy.) George kisses up from Jim’s shoulder, up the side of his neck, behind his ear. Jim bends to spit and rinse.

Jim lays his hands over George’s at his waist and interlaces their fingers.

“I thought you wanted to go to bed,” Jim says to the George in the mirror.

“I do.”

“You’re not–”

“I love you,” George says, the George in the mirror performing a perfect echo, but it’s _his_ George—Jim’s George—whose nose nuzzles behind his ear, whose sigh whispers across his skin.

“Let me put you to bed,” Jim says.

And Jim does. It’s too hot to sleep curled up one inside the other, but George drapes a hand over Jim’s hip, and it stays there until morning, when Jim rises, lifts the hand and presses a kiss in the center of its palm before he gets out of the bed.

Jim doesn’t have to wait, on a Saturday morning, for George to find his will to face the day at the bottom of a cup of coffee. George has slept late and allowed two aspirin and a large glass of water to take care of his mild hangover while he took a long, hot shower. He smiles when he walks into the kitchen to find Jim at the stove, folding eggs around peppers and sausage and cheese. He kisses Jim on the cheek, pours himself a coffee from the percolator and sits to wait for the traditional Saturday breakfast: omelette and home-fried potatoes, the way Jim’s mother does them, with onions and a dash of malt vinegar.

“Will you tell me something?”

“Anything, of course.” George smiles and spears the last piece of potato on his plate.

“You told me once, about Charley, about sleeping with her. You told me it didn’t mean nothing to you, but it meant much more to her.”

George takes their plates and silverware to the sink, turning his back as Jim forms the question he’s really asking.

“What _did_ it mean to you?”

George turns on the faucet to wet the plates, to prevent the leftover streaks of ketchup from crusting.

“I don’t know.” George turns, leaning his back against the counter, legs crossed at the ankle, hands gripping the edge. “I’ve never really bothered to think it through, I guess.”

“Will you try?”

“Why does it matter?”

Jim turns his empty coffee mug between his palms, then stands and only speaks after he’s poured himself another cup, and one for George too, that he presses into George’s hands and holds with him, for a few moments, his hands around George’s, the coffee steaming up between them.

“The way she kisses you goodbye.” Jim takes his hands away, occupies them with his own mug of coffee once again. “The way _you_ kiss her goodbye. It’s not that– I don’t like it, is the truth. I’m sorry, but that’s– Last night she gave me this _look_ , when you were pulling away, and you were still– I don’t know how you missed it.”

“She’s jealous of you.”

“That doesn’t bother you?”

“I can’t help it. Or change it.”

“Do you _like_ it?”

George pauses for a sip of coffee. “No, not at all. I would certainly prefer it if she truly understood that what I feel for her is nothing like romantic love.”

“But it is love?”

“Familial love. She’s like a sister, I suppose. Not that I would know what that’s like.”

“I’m not so close with my sisters.”

“Is there no variance across human experiences?”

Jim rolls his eyes. “Don’t be smart with me. I’m– I don’t want her to give me that look again. I want you to do something about it.”

“What kind of look was it, precisely?”

“Territorial, George. ‘He was mine first,’ she was saying. And maybe, ‘He could be mine again.’”

“He really couldn’t.”

“She doesn’t believe that.”

“What do you want me to do, Jim? She has her delusions, and haven’t we all? I can’t force her to believe anything. You can’t either.”

“I could stop you seeing her.”

“Could you, really?”

“I could _ask_ you to stop.” Jim has left his coffee behind on the counter and stepped into George’s space, holding his gaze.

“Are you asking me?” George asks, after the pause has become too pregnant.

Jim doesn’t answer the question. He lifts a hand to George’s face, tracing the line of his cheekbone with fingertips before laying his palm flat to George’s cheek. George closes his eyes with the caress, perhaps helpless under it. “I have a theory about you, George.” George opens his eyes again. “My love, my George,” Jim can only be opening with such endearments to soften the blow. “My theory is that you like Charlotte’s delusion of her future, married to you. Because there’s part of you that– You don’t share her delusion, exactly, but secretly you _want_ to share it. Because what your relationship with her—sleeping together a few times, you said, but it was a relationship, I’m sure of it. Your relationship with her is _your_ happy memory of love within the bounds of what our society expects. You treasure it, in the sad way that we treasure anything we’re never going to have again. Youth. Innocence. Virginity.”

Jim stops. He waits.

“Does this lecture have a point?” George finally asks, peevish but quiet, almost timid.

“It has a question.”

“Which is?”

Jim kisses George with no warning, George’s coffee between them and in danger of being spilt. Jim holds George’s head at the angle he wants and presses his thumb into the corner of George’s mouth until George opens it, opens to Jim’s claim, rough and wet and thorough. At first, Jim fists his free hand at George’s shoulder, pulling his dressing gown tight across the backs of his shoulders. Then Jim slips the hand under the edge of the fabric to touch George’s chest, skin to skin. George begins to assert himself in the kiss, and Jim scrapes his nails over where George’s heart is buried.

Jim slows the kiss in small increments until the connection is broken but their lips, swollen, are only millimeters apart.

“The question is,” Jim takes George’s face between both his palms, “is it a conscious choice? To want to wish for you and Charlotte, husband and wife? Do you wish you fell in love with women, instead of men? Do you wish–” Jim’s voice is choked, and he turns his face away, asking his final question with his lips brushing George’s ear: “Do you wish you had fallen in love with Charley, and not with me?”

“No,” George says, immediately. He twists to deposit his mug on the counter and pulls Jim into him, holding him tight. “No, I do not.”

Jim pushes away. “You didn’t even think about it!”

“Am I supposed to have to? I love you, Jim, I–”

“You’re telling me what I want to hear when I want the _truth_.”

“The truth,” George says flatly, his hands briefly fists at his sides. “The truth is you’ve put far more thought into this than I have, and I don’t know what to say. Do I, in some hidden away corner of my mind, wish that I was capable of heterosexual love? If I do, I should think it’s only natural! It’s only what’s shoved into our brains by nearly every book and play and poem and romantic subject of a painting in the world. I should think it’s only a basic human tendency—or would you say _weakness_?—to want what’s constantly celebrated before our eyes, from our very beginnings as small children all the way through our adult years until our deaths! I’m sorry if I’m too weak for your taste, Jim. I’m sorry if I have doubts about my own nature and contradictions within myself. You can be assured that it’s not easy, that I’m tortured by them and that I wish I weren’t. You can be assured—if you can believe it—that you, meeting you and falling in love with you has rescued me from the worst of the torture, and I could not ever dream of repaying that debt except through the affection and love which are yours in my heart already. I love you, and I always will, and if I have to ask your forgiveness for that, then I do.”

Jim turns away. His eyes fix on nothing in the distance, and the impression is of hardness, blankness, slate stone washed clean by a storm. George’s shoulders fall into a slump. He leaves Jim and his cooling mug of coffee behind in the kitchen. He doesn’t see the tears that track down Jim’s cheeks or hear the muted sobs when Jim bends over the counter, muffling his mouth in his folded arms.

It rains, in the afternoon. The clouds block out the sun so thoroughly that three in the afternoon takes on the aspect of ten at night. George reads by the window, though today it offers him no light and no solace. He’s paging through _Metamorphosis_ , because he’s thinking of trying to teach it. (Considering and dreading in equal measure, going by how many times he’s started and stopped, how many pages are dog-eared, then smoothed out a week later.)

George falls asleep.

“You should come to bed,” Jim says, shaking George gently by the shoulder. Jim is perched at the edge of the sofa, next to George’s hips. He waits while George comes awake, bit by bit, then walks to the bedroom. The rectangle of light outlined by the bedroom doorway is the only source of light in this house, making it seem—almost—as if nothing else exists. The bedroom is The Universe contracted, free will rendered obsolete, George’s destiny.

George lies down next to Jim and reaches for him. Jim doesn’t push him away, doesn’t encourage him closer. After a beat, he speaks, “I won’t say I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

“I wouldn’t ask you to,” George affirms.

* * *

The G.I. bill sends Jim back to school, but Jim arranges it all in secret, not a word to George before the day that George returns home from the college—a Thursday, a gentle one, the sun weak when filtered through low hazy clouds. Jim has laid the dining table: a cheese board with George’s favorite (a blue Stilton), a bottle of extra-dry champagne chilling in a canister of ice, unopened, and a white envelope, addressed to Jim, address side up. The seal, beneath and hidden, was carefully broken by Jim earlier, a slow smile following.

“What’s this then?” George asks.

“Hello to you _too_.” Jim steps around the table and smoothes his hands from the center of George’s chest to his hips, leans in to kiss George his greeting but lightly, at the corner of George’s mouth. And he stays when George turns into the kiss and draws Jim closer, groans at George’s hand on the back of his neck, squeezing gently.

Jim is a magician, adept at sleight-of-hand, or perhaps least distracted when he appears most distracted. The letter is in his left hand now, slid nimbly off the table with two fingers. He breaks away from George’s kiss and presses the letter to George’s chest, all but winking and bouncing on his toes with anticipation. “Have a look,” he says.

George takes half a step back and scans the envelope, eyebrows jumping at the return address. He withdraws the single sheet inside and reads it quickly, then replaces it neatly, attempting to stretch the moment despite the smile already breaking out on his face.

“You’re going to be an architect.”

“That’s the plan.” Jim returns to the table and plucks the champagne from the ice, tilts it at George, questioning.

“Yes, of course.” George deposits the letter back on the table. “Naturally we celebrate. It’s wonderful. You’re wonderful.”

“I’m hardly anything _yet_ ,” Jim protests, then pops the cork and pours the first glass, “but I’m inspired.”

George accepts the first glass and holds it delicately. “Going to build your very own glass house one day?”

Jim clinks his glasses with George’s and vows, “ _Never_.”

“Whyever not?”

“I rather like yours.”

George realizes his mistake. “Ours,” he corrects.

“Ours,” Jim repeats in a whisper.

“I won’t live forever. It’ll be yours one day.”

“No.” Jim steps close and smoothes a palm over George’s cheek, holds him by the jaw, where he can feel the pulse keeping time underneath George’s skin. “You’re not going to go before me.”

George’s eyes have gone glassy, and his jaw tightens under Jim’s palm. “Well it’s certainly not going to be the other way around.”

“Together, then.” Jim’s words in George’s ear, making him shiver, and Jim’s lips on his neck, and he forgets about his champagne until half of it slops out, but it doesn’t even break the moment. Jim sets the glasses to safety on the table while George works on the buttons of his shirt.

What starts in desperate struggle against the threat of oblivion gentles under the low-hanging late summer evening’s light, bending slowly into dusk. George maps Jim’s bare golden chest with his lips and tongue and takes Jim in his mouth until he’s gasping and twitching his hips. George wants so _badly_ and is so persuaded by Jim panting on his back, cock darkly beckoning that he forgoes all but a bit of Vaseline and straddles Jim, guiding Jim’s cock back and opening himself slowly on it, easing down and down until he can relax in the cradle of Jim’s hips and lean forward to coax kisses from Jim’s slack mouth.

When Jim recovers himself, he reclaims the use of his hands. They wander George’s shoulders and back and hips and where the two of them are joined, exploring gently, then hips again, guiding George into a faster rhythm. They clutch tight at Jim’s climax, tighter at George’s, as if Jim is afraid that George will disappear with his release, float away.

George doesn’t move, despite Jim softening quickly inside him, only leans down again to capture Jim’s lips in a sweet kiss. “Congratulations,” he says.

New Year’s, 1950. The oaks are silent around this house, not even a whisper of wind to disturb them. A chill is in the air, dew is in the grass, and the nearly full moon silvers over everything. The all of it together so like a picture postcard that the sensation of time passing stops entirely. There is no sensation of waiting, only a pause, as if between breaths.

They return.

They stumble, George more than Jim. This house, naturally, admits them without comment. Just inside the door, Jim wedges George against the wall, taking George’s face in both of his hands.

“You didn’t kiss me at midnight,” Jim accuses, his mouth so close to George’s that their lips almost touch as Jim releases the ‘m’ of midnight.

George tilts his chin up into the accusation and anchors Jim with a hand at the back of his head, his other arm slung around Jim’s waist. It takes a few light presses of lips to lips before George finds the angle he wants, and then he sighs into it, relaxing back into the wall, pulling Jim to stay with him.

There’s time for this, time for slow and gentle. Jim brushes his thumbs across George’s cheekbones, and George draws Jim’s shirt out from his trousers so he can get a hand underneath and spread his fingers across the warm smooth skin at the small of Jim’s back. Jim flinches slightly and releases George’s mouth.

“Cold hands, old man,” he says, detouring to kiss George’s cheek.

“My apologies,” George rumbles. He drags his fingertips as far up Jim’s spine as he can reach inside Jim’s only partially untucked shirt.

“The thing is–” Jim whispers into George’s ear, then distracts himself by nosing at it and nipping the lobe.

George tucks three fingers into Jim’s waistband and tightens his grip on Jim’s nape. “What is it?”

“I don’t think you’re sorry at all.”

George smiles, and whatever retort he may have had is lost to the next kiss, Jim’s mouth landing on George’s smile, coaxing it open into a deeper kiss. George sighs again, dropping more walls and worries and rules through the release of carbon dioxide, a poison that carries other, more nebulous poisons along and out to sea, as if by tidal force.

George releases Jim’s nape in favor of getting both hands under his shirt. Jim shivers anew as George traces his spine, the flare of his ribs, the taper of his waist. Jim breaks off the kiss to catch his breath, but the brief loss of Jim’s mouth is a crime that George must punish: he moves his hands lower, curving them around the swell of Jim’s buttocks.

“If you’re not going to kiss me,” George says, “are you going to take me to bed?”

Jim moves his hands to George’s chest, rubbing firmly even as he pushes back against George’s hold on his ass, provoking George into digging his fingers in and grunting.

“Oh, I’ll take you.” Jim winks and ducks away from George’s mouth. He wriggles out of George’s grasp, but before George can even protest, he takes George by the hand, takes him back to their bedroom, and takes him.

* * *

December, 1951, a Monday. This isn’t the first time these walls have heard this argument. Nor the second, nor even the third.

There’s hardly a flat surface in the kitchen for toast and coffee. Everywhere are mostly empty glasses, some third of them stained with lipstick; George recognizes the three or four of Charley’s by the color and shape of the lip print, not so much from the memory of her social circuits last night. His head is throbbing, his brain too confined in the tight space of his skull. The evening prior is an indistinct swirl of champagne and whisky, conversation and laughter. Fun, but not so much this morning, with the house a mess and an early class to teach.

“Are you–” George begins to ask.

“Wouldn’t it be nice if we had a housekeeper to take care of this?” Jim’s eating his breakfast standing up, his coffee mug perched on the mantle, plate in his hand. The morning light highlights his perfectly combed hair and the length of his neck, unmarked, between shirt collar and hairline. There’s a faint bruise below his collar, at the junction of his right shoulder and his neck, but only George knows that it’s there.

“Nice, certainly,” George says, taking a sip of his coffee and looking away from Jim, looking anywhere else. “Dangerous, even more so.”

“More dangerous than our neighbors?”

“Yes, naturally. Last time I checked, a housekeeper would have to enter our house.”

Jim isn’t usually the type to pick a fight, but something is different today. Not enough sleep, perhaps. He continues on, “And what exactly is the danger of having a housekeeper in our house?”

“She’d _know_ ,” George explains.

“The neighbors know, George.”

“The neighbors strongly suspect.”

“What’s the difference? Are you planning to suck me off in front of our housekeeper, or ‘ _bugger_ ’ me while she dusts around us?”

“Don’t be an arse. And forgive me for being old and cautious. It wasn’t so long ago that a man in possession of a tube of vaseline could be convicted of sodomy.”

“And hanged for it, in dear old England?” Jim sneered. “You live in America, George, darling.” He left the _And we aren’t Barbarians_ unspoken.

“The vaseline case was here, in California, _sweetheart_.”

Jim switched tacts: “A housekeeper who turned us in, sufficient evidence or not, would put herself out of a job. It’s nonsensical.”

“People don’t always make sense.”

“But they do have a marked tendency to serve their own interests.”

George took a breath to retort, but Jim interrupted.

“I’m not asking you to commit, George. I’m asking you to _try_. Put an ad in the paper, interview a few candidates. You can do it at the college. No one comes here until you think she might work out. Tell them about your ‘roommate’ in the interview, watch for their reaction.”

“I don’t want to tell half a dozen candidates I live with a male roommate. That’s– I don’t think you understand–”

“Just one, then, George. Just try interviewing one, see what happens. We’re too busy to take care of this house, and it’s only going to get worse after I graduate, you know that. Associates work long hours.”

“I’ll think about it,” George agrees, though it’s already a commitment, sitting poorly under his skin. It goes against _every_ instinct of privacy he has, but at the same time, Jim is correct about the practical constraints they live under. There’s simply no way out but through: George must go out into the world and find someone he can trust to bring back to this house. He must expand his tiny circle—Charley, Jim—by one more. He must trust another without the bond of youth and memory or love.

* * *

Jim calls from the motel that Mr. Ackerly has chosen for the mid-point of their drive. George has—again—been waiting for the telephone to ring all day. Jim’s parents, and his mother in particular, had surrounded him at all times after the accident, allowing him no privacy. Or so Mr. Ackerly had related for George, some degree of abashed apology softening the tone of his voice in the telling.

George answers simply, “Hello.”

“Hi old man,” Jim says, and George knows without seeing that Jim is cracking a smile, but his voice is weak, faded and slower than usual.

“How is the pain?”

“We made good time,” Jim says. “Hank says we should turn up around four o’clock tomorrow.”

“You’ve ignored my question.”

“For a reason.”

“Was this the wrong thing to do?”

“Hardly, George. Don’t worry.” A pause begins with a sharp intake of breath, and George imagines the worst, but then Jim picks up his thread again, “I’d much rather listen to you talk.”

“About what?”

“Anything. I’m going to drop off in a minute or so anyway.”

George is halfway through a dramatic retelling of the most recent horror of a student he’s suffered when he realizes how long the silence has stretched on Jim’s end of the line. He stops speaking, and he can hear Jim breathing in the deep and regular intervals of sleep. It’s a comfort to hear, and so rather than end the call, George listens, resting his own eyes and nearly falling into a doze himself.

“Mr. Falconer?” It’s only a stage whisper, but it startles George all the same.

“Yes,” George replies softly.

He hears movement on the other end of the line, and then Mr. Ackerly speaks more freely, at a normal volume. “Jim’s fallen asleep. The painkillers make him quite drowsy.”

“I gathered as much, thank you.”

“You’re welcome.” George expects Mr. Ackerly to continue into the pleasantries necessitated by courtesy to conclude their call, but he doesn’t. “I’m looking forward to meeting you. Jim’s told me– Well, not a whole lot, to be honest, but I’m interested all the same.”

George doesn’t know what to say to this, and as he casts about in his mind for a strategy to navigate this unexpected conversational adventure, Mr. Ackerly begins again: “We have teaching in common, as I understand it.”

“Oh,” George recovers, “what is it that you teach?”

“Chemistry. At the high school in Fort Collins.”

“Chemistry and teenagers sounds like–“

“A recipe for disaster, yes. It can be very much that at times, I’m afraid.”

“But you enjoy teaching, overall?”

“Certainly,” Mr. Ackerly affirms. “It has its moments.”

“Yes, it does.” George thinks of his latest wide-eyed boy wonder, Kenny, who’d charmed the shaving-off-his-eyebrow-on-mescaline story from him just the other day.

“I’ll let you get back to your evening,” Mr. Ackerly concludes. “We’ll be meeting tomorrow after all.”

“Indeed, Mr. Ackerly. I’m looking forward to it.”

George stares out into nothing for a few minutes after hanging up the phone. It seems like an oversight now, but he hadn’t actually considered what Mr. Ackerly might be like, hadn’t considered the possibility that they might have anything in common, aside from a connection to Jim.

* * *

Mr. Ackerly’s crossing of this house’s threshold, hat in one hand out of politeness, leather overnight satchel in the other, is a momentous occasion in more than one respect. George made the decision early on that his house was to be—with the now notable exception of Alva and the ephemeral exceptions of occasional parties—private, only for family, and not just any family but _chosen_ family: Charley, then Jim. The thought, perhaps, had not occurred, or had not been fully computed, that people are rarely single stars but members of constellations that wheel together tracing their circuits through the sky. Mr. Ackerly is but one member at the end of a long sweeping arm of stars, traveling with Jim. (It would be unfair to them to say _trailing_ him.)

George greets Mr. Ackerly outside after his muted green Chevrolet sedan rolls up to the garage. A ritual handshake, ritual words, George visibly stumbling through his response to Mr. Ackerly’s, “It’s a pleasure to meet you,” or similar. Next the ritual removal of a hat, set aside on top of the car while Mr. Ackerly bends himself inside to manhandle Jim out of it.

Mr. Ackerly is a different man in his physical form than George had imagined. He’s solidly _masculine_ —broad shoulders and chest; deep five o’clock shadow; coarse, dark hair—in a way that has instantly destroyed, for George, the connection they’d forged the previous evening on the telephone, learning of their shared occupation.

George keeps a tight lid on his emotions, but as Mr. Ackerly moves Jim into the house, he betrays them physically: relief revealed in the almost-sick greenness of his convulsive half-swallow, jealous anger in the fist clenched in his trouser pocket, longing in the way the angle of his body swivels to keep Jim at its center. George holds the door open for them, then follows inside and leads the way to the bedroom.

Jim is easily, though not painlessly, settled onto the bed, his right leg three times its normal size in a plaster cast from foot to the top of his thigh. Mr. Ackerly helps to arrange a stack of pillows under Jim’s calf to elevate the broken leg higher, then beats a hasty retreat with the excuse of a great need to fetch his bag from the car. Perhaps he’s uncomfortable, or perhaps he’s sympathetic to George’s obvious aching need to touch Jim, to kiss him on the forehead tenderly, which he does, sitting on the edge of the bed, as soon as Mr. Ackerly has left the room. George kisses Jim on the mouth next, pressing hard, both hands holding Jim in place.

“Hello, old man,” Jim smiles softly, as if this were just any kiss, just any afternoon greeting. But there are tears in his eyes as there aren’t for just any lover’s kiss.

“You could have _died_.”

George bends again to kiss Jim’s mouth, gentle, just for the pleasure and truth of contact.

“I didn’t.” Jim lifts a hand to George’s cheek, soothing. “I won’t.”

“You will someday!”

“Not today. Not soon.” Jim pulls George down for another kiss, longer, stretching through moment after moment until the tension starts to release from George’s spine. “Go settle our houseguest. I’m not going anywhere.”

George makes his way back from the bedroom to the entryway and arrives just as Mr. Ackerly is crossing this house’s threshold.

Every aspect of Mr. Ackerly’s visit presents a logistical challenge. First: dinner. Jim is not able to sit at a table comfortably and must eat from a tray in the bedroom. George is of course happy to do this, but hospitality demands that George serve and eat with his guest.

A pot of barley and mushroom soup is already on the stove because George had needed something to do with his hands. The remaining dinner preparation tasks—salad, a fresh salad dressing, warming the baguette in the oven—George stretches as far as he can, pushing back the moment where a strategy will have to be chosen and embarked on.

“It smells delicious in here,” Mr. Ackerly comments, appearing from the living room, “and you have a beautiful house.”

“ _Our_ house, mine and Jim’s,” George corrects out of habit, then winces. “Thank you on both counts.”

“I hope you won’t think it terribly rude, but–”

George tenses, bracing for–

“I’d like to take a stroll before supper.”

“Pardon?”

“I don’t mean to spurn your hospitality, but my legs are in rather bad need of a stretch after the long drive. Is there a good place to walk nearby?”

George catches up slowly, accidentally peeling the carrot in his hand down to nothing in his distraction. Finally, he turns, wiping his hands on his apron. “I don’t think it rude at all. The beach is just a few blocks to the west, you can’t miss it. It’s lovely this time of evening.”

Mr. Ackerly tips his hat to George on his way out, and when the door is closed behind him, George gives himself a moment of pure relief, leaning back against the counter, then rights himself and prepares a tray with salads, bread, and bowls of soup for himself and Jim. Mr. Ackerly has given him this: freedom from the burden of hospitality, permission to care for his own. The generosity strikes him so sharply it clutches at his heart, stopping his breath for a moment before he moves on.

Second among the logistical challenges posed by Mr. Ackerly’s visit is the matter of sleeping arrangements. It would—obviously—be an offense to propriety to share the bed with Jim, although that’s out of the question anyway due to his injury. He needs space and undisturbed rest. But George aches to be near him and would happily put a sleeping roll on the floor next to the bed, but again the implications are too unsavory for polite company, as they say. So the challenge is to insist that Mr. Ackerly take the guest room while George sleeps on the sofa, but it becomes moot when George falls asleep curled into Jim’s uninjured side before Mr. Ackerly returns from his walk.

This house tries not to alert George of Mr. Ackerly’s return, but its sinew and bone can only be so quiet, and George awakes if not with the _snick_ of Mr. Ackerly closing the door behind him, then with his foreign footfalls coaxing an unfamiliar rhythm of creaks and groans from the parquet.

George has left the bedroom door open, as is their common habit, and he is only just conscious enough to be rolling onto his back, away from Jim, when Mr. Ackerly’s shape darkens the doorway. When his brain computes the semantics of Jim next to him plus the shape in the doorway, adds these to the significant conclusion of _exposure_ , he is instantly alert, sitting up, then standing and apologizing, “I’m so sorry, Mr. Ackerly, I wasn’t–”

“Hank,” Jim cuts in, and George looks down in surprise. He hadn’t realized Jim was awake, but he’s titled his head towards the doorway to speak to his cousin, “give us just a minute?”

“Of course,” Mr. Ackerly agrees, and he retreats, catching the door handle to pull it behind him, closing George and Jim in privacy.

Jim stretches for the lamp on his nightstand and turns it on. He lies back in the pool of light, and it only serves to etch the healing gash across his right cheek in harsher contrast.

“He knew already, you realize,” Jim says softly.

George works his mouth, but he has no response.

“Go put yourself together,” Jim cocks his chin towards the en suite.

The instructions are helpful, even if the mirror reflects George’s state back to him far too truthfully. The mirrors of this house have reflected George in nearly every state he’s experienced from the mundane grumpiness and sagging skin below his eyes of a Monday morning to the anticipation of a night not yet ended after a summer’s night walk to the bar, no jacket necessary in the heat, hair curled from the humidity on his return and a young man waiting for him on the bed. Now the mirror shows him his fear: the tense set of his jaw, the nervous twitch of an eyelid. George runs the tap and splashes his face with cold water, then pats it dry. His reflection doesn’t look perceptibly different afterwards, but the bracing cold has given him a sliver of courage, or reminded him that it was already there. He can see it in the steadiness of his gaze.

“How did you know?” George had asked Jim, the night they met at the Starboard Side.

“You have honest eyes,” Jim had said, "You looked at me, and I knew that you wanted the same thing I did.”

George bends to kiss Jim softly when he returns to the bed, and Jim holds him by the nape for a pair of moments after the kiss concludes. “I love you,” he says softly.

“I love you too.” George tries never to say it the same twice, so it doesn’t become mere reflex.

“Sit with me.” Jim had levered himself up to a mostly sitting position on a pile of pillows against the headboard. George climbs onto the bed next to him and leans back against the bare headboard with his legs stretched out in front of him. A soft knock sounds from the bedroom door, and as Jim says, “Come in,” he takes George’s hand and squeezes it gently, then drops it before George can pull it away.

Mr. Ackerly enters with a tray of coffees and passes them around. He pulls a chair from the side of the room to near the bed and sits, his legs crossed at the ankle.

“Thank you for the coffee, Mr. Ackerly, much appreciated.”

“Harold, please, or Hank, if you prefer,” Mr. Ackerly corrects.

“And I don’t believe I was able to properly introduce you earlier.” Jim glances over at George, then turns to Hank. “George, my cousin Hank. Hank, this is my partner and lover, George.”

“It’s a pleasure to meet,” Hank affirms, “although I wish it hadn’t been under such circumstances.”

“Agreed,” George says, turning his gaze from Hank to Jim, helpless against the compulsion to reaffirm Jim’s presence next to him, alive and breathing. “Thank you again for driving him home. This must be a terrible interruption.”

“No, not at all,” Hank dismisses. “And besides– It’s good to get away from the snow, and I’ve never been to California before.”

“Which you cannot blame on a lack of recommendations. I’ve been saying for years that you should come,” Jim adds.

“That’s true,” Hank admits. “I suppose the truth is I just don’t travel very much.”

“Your family keeps you at home?” George asks, expecting confirmation.

“No, my wife passed away years ago, I’m afraid. And she was sick for many years before that, never healthy enough to bear children.”

“I’m very sorry to hear that.”

Hank thanks George and moves the topic of conversation to the house, the neighborhood, the city. George finds himself unexpectedly relaxing into the small talk. Not completely, but to a greater degree than he’s accustomed. The Mr. Ackerly he conversed with on the phone, the fellow teacher, is revealed to exist still underneath his unexpected packaging.

“May I ask,” Hank circles the conversation around to a new topic, “When did the two of you meet?"

George smiles at the memory, but Jim starts the story: “Just after the war, when they gave us leave here to celebrate.”

“There was this unbearable heat wave,” George continues, “and I’d escaped the house. Not this house, it hadn’t been built yet, but the one I had down the street, before. I meant to go down to the beach, but–” George pauses, then resumes, drawing Hank directly into the story, feeling oddly lighter with each word he utters, “Did you see that little bar, the Starboard Side, on your walk earlier?” Hank nods, and George continues, “I stopped in for a beer and cigarettes,”

“He doesn’t smoke anymore,” Jim cuts in.

“Naturally not, since you detest it,” George says. He would drop a kiss on Jim’s hand, if they were alone in this moment, and he’s tempted now, despite the audience. “I stepped out for some air—the bar was packed with revelers—and that’s when I first saw Jim.”

“What a wonderful occasion to meet.”

“Any occasion would have satisfied me,” George confesses, and he basks in Jim’s crooked smile and a burst of a feeling that expands in his chest, filling all the space behind his ribs. He identifies the feeling as one of being glad, for the first time, to have a witness—an outside witness, not one of his chosen—to his love. 

**Author's Note:**

> A note on the timeline of events: The screenplay implies that George & Jim moved into the "glass house" together, but that's never the way I interpreted it when I watched the film (i.e., before I started working on this fic and downloaded the screenplay for reference). So in this fic my interpretation is that it was George's post-war indulgence (˜1946) to have the house designed for him and shortly thereafter that Jim moved in with him (1948 is the year the screenplay gives for the "life in a glass house" exchange, whereas the main action of the film takes place in 1962). In the film, George says he's been living "in the canyon" since 1938, but the house is _definitely_ not that old, so I figure he had another place in the canyon, bought the land for the glass house sometime around 1938 but couldn't get anyone to build on it until after the war. The story about picnicking on the plot of land and the house being designed to feel like a picnic among the oaks is simply an instance of [art imitating life](http://la.curbed.com/2012/11/5/10309814/touring-john-lautners-incredible-schaffer-house-and-talking-about-why) (although Lautner's Schaffer residence in Glendale, California, the house that appears in the film, was built even later, in 1949).


End file.
